Home › The Cherry › Cherry Shrub
Cherry Shrub
Cherry shrub is a modified form of the syrup. To each quart of cherries add one cup of water and stew till soft. Press and strain the fruit; allow a cup of sugar for each pint of juice; boil to a syrup; strain, and bottle while hot.
A plain fruit syrup meant to be diluted into a summer drink. The whole thing turns on how far you take the boil and how you store what you bottle.
- Boil to a syrup means a target, not a guessBoil to a syrup -- the book gives no temperature. A modern equivalent is to take the sweetened juice to somewhere around 215-220°F (a few degrees above boiling water), which gives a syrup that pours. Stop well short and it stays thin and ferments quickly; go much past it and you are heading toward a jelly set.
- What a quart of cherries gives youA quart of whole cherries is about 1 1/2 lb, and with the cup of water it will yield somewhere near a pint of strained juice, so plan on about a cup of sugar. The finished syrup from that quart is roughly 1 1/2 cups — enough for six to eight glasses once diluted.
- PitsThe recipe assumes you stew the cherries whole. That is fine for a short stew, but do not let stones sit in the hot juice for an extended infusion; sour cherry kernels carry amygdalin. Pitting first also makes pressing far less work.
- Press and strainThe book directs pressing, which gives the most juice but a cloudier syrup. If you want a clear shrub, let the cooked fruit drip through a jelly bag or a double layer of muslin without squeezing instead.
- Two strainingsThe second strain, after boiling, catches the scum and any sugar crust. Skim as it boils and strain through fresh cloth into the bottles.
- Bottling while hotHot-filling clean bottles and capping at once was one of the common household preservation methods of the period. It is not a measured process by current standards: treat the result as a refrigerator syrup, keep it cold, and use it within a few weeks, or process filled jars in a boiling-water bath following a current tested guide.
- ServingAbout one part syrup to four parts cold water or soda water, over ice. It also does well over milk, and as a sauce for rice pudding or vanilla ice cream.
- No vinegar hereDespite the name, this version contains none. If you want the sharper old-style drinking vinegar, a few tablespoons of cider vinegar stirred into the finished syrup will do it, but that is a different recipe from the one printed.
Shrub comes through English from the Arabic sharāb, a drink, and by the eighteenth century it covered two rather different things: a spirit-and-citrus cordial kept in the sideboard, and a fruit-and-vinegar syrup kept in the pantry and let down with water. American cookbooks of the nineteenth century increasingly meant the second, and the word is often said to have drifted further still, in the temperance-minded decades on either side of 1900, to mean simply a sweetened fruit concentrate for a cold drink — which is exactly what this entry describes, filed as a variation on the cherry syrup that precedes it. Cherries were the natural candidate: they crop heavily over a short season, and their acidity both keeps the syrup and makes it taste of something once diluted. Bottling small-fruit syrups hot was a standard household answer to a glut, and a shelf of them was how a summer orchard was made to last into the winter.